The Recovery of Reason

Here is the opening of George Neumayr's editorial in the November 2011 issue of Catholic World Report:

The most robust defense of reason today comes not from academics and politicians but from the papacy. At a time of growing skepticism and relativism, Pope Benedict XVI stands almost alone in reason’s defense.

In his 2006 Regensburg lecture, he guarded reason against two types of foes:  extremists from the East who push a distorted faith without reason and secularists from the West who advance a distorted reason without faith.

His September 22 speech to the German parliament in Berlin marks another signal contribution to the vindication of reason. This time Pope Benedict was addressing legislators who have abandoned the full range of reason as the basis for law and rely instead on a cramped and fashionable relativism. Over 50 German lawmakers boycotted the speech, providing an unwitting punctuation mark to the Pope’s call for the need to restore reason to politics. 

The relativism of the majority is a dangerous foundation on which to base the state, the Pope argued. Without leaders who exercise reason’s grasp of the natural law, on which human rights and justice absolutely depend, the state becomes nothing more than an expression of arbitrary power:

Read the entire editorial on www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

Comments

[Robert Miller]

This expresses very well the Holy Father's understanding of the objective conditions in which contemporary man finds himself. Neumayr, as usual, gets to the heart of the matter.
Caritas in Veritate and the recent "Note" from the Pontifical Council for Peace & Justice also come to terms with these objective conditions as they pertain to political, social and economic matters. Why do many of us regard these latter as problemmatic?
Everything this Pope does, it seems to me, is designed to respond to the real needs of our time. In matters Catholic he finds the rationale and the means for reconciliation with Anglicans and traditionalists (even if these latter remain stiff-necked and obstructionist). In matters secular, he offers the accredited representatives of the Enlightenment one last chance at collaboration. In matters "world-religious", he offers Moslems and the others the benefit of the Catholic Church's experience of encounter with (a now moribund) modernity.
Yes, Pope Benedict XVI is the last defender of reason -- and against all comers: Left and Right, conservative and liberal, traditionalist and progressive, modern and post-modern, etc., etc.
Thank God for the Holy Father.

[Patrick]

Every time I read or hear something fro our pope I am reminded of what someone said about JPII and B16. They said that JPII opened peoples hearts and B16 is filling them. To me this pope is a Saint. Truly!